BUZZ
Researchers say women in study rationalized men doing less, with one pointing to husband’s 15-hour-a-day construction job
Society isn’t paying enough attention to how American women are disproportionately burdened by home tap water use, according to a new study from the UCLA Streisand Center’s Gender and Water research hub.
Even though women in the study claimed not to be unfairly burdened, anthropology Professor Jessica Cattelino and her research team made the case that they still are.
The study “Gender and residential water use in Los Angeles: Ingrained, untapped, and porous,” was published in June in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. It followed 36 families in the Los Angeles area for several years, tracking their residential water use through interviews and water diary entries.
“What the team found was a striking mismatch between what households believe and what they actually do,” a university news article states.
“Across nearly all 36 households, women carried disproportionate responsibility for water-related labor — cooking, laundry, cleaning bathrooms, monitoring children’s hygiene, and the ongoing mental work of remembering what needs to get done,” according to the article. “Yet when researchers asked participants directly whether gender shaped their water use, the near-universal answer was no.”
The study cited several examples from the research:
Some participants seemed content with this arrangement. In the Camacho household in MacArthur Park, Estefania habitually monitored her adult son Justin’s long showers, in addition to her daily tasks of handwashing delicate clothing, cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and cooking. In the Flores-Castillo household, also in MacArthur Park, Valeria embraced responsibility for maintaining the household for her family of four. Though she was also juggling caretaking for two young children while working towards her associate’s degree, she minimized her own contributions: “Well, my poor husband [Juan, a construction worker], he works all day…sometimes he will leave at 5 in the morning [and come back] around 8 o’clock at night.”
In another case, one woman described splitting the water-related chores in half with her partner, but the researchers found that the male partner was doing less than she was.
Professor Cattelino and her team also noted that some participants “looked confused or asked us to repeat the question when interviewers brought up gender.
“When participants realized, upon reflection and in response to questioning or water diary data, that their practices diverged from their egalitarian ideals, they quickly rationalized why household responsibilities might appear unequal between the men and women of the household but were not, in their view, gendered,” according to the study.
Cattelino and her team blamed this “contradiction” on “a neocolonial gender blind spot that assumes that the Global North has moved ‘beyond’ gender as a basis for organizing life unequally.”
The study concluded by urging policy makers and utilities leaders to start listening to women more often.
Women “are an untapped resource for water expertise. Women are decision-makers about water, for themselves and others, but their knowledge and labor too often go unrecognized and undervalued,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion.
Additionally, “more attention to gendered water use may improve water conservation and, importantly, contribute to justice, both within and beyond households,” they wrote.
MORE: Experts dispute claim ‘anti-transgender laws’ drive ‘suicidality’
